Archives | Writing and Healing

The Enchanted Loom

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 27, 2008 in Uncategorized

More good newsfrom Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley A little over ten years ago now, when I was teaching writing at a drug rehab facility, I remember one of the young men, Rusty, a creative and gifted writer, telling me about a visit he’d had just had with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had begun him on a medication (I can’t now remember which one) and the psychiatrist went on to tell him that he was going to have to be on it for the rest of his life. He told Rusty that he’d destroyed a part of his brain with the drugs he’d taken and that the destruction was permanent. This is the first story that came to mind as I was thinking about why a book like Sharon Begley’s book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, might be important. What happens when any one of us begins to think—for whatever reason—drugs, genetics, early traumatic experiences, early deprivation—what happens when we begin to think that our brains are permanently and irrevocably damaged? What kinds of decisions might we make as a result of that model? And what might happen—what different choices might we make—if we were to begin to imagine the brain as an enchanted loom? The metaphor is one first used in 1917 by a British neuroscientist, Charles Sherrington. He described the brain as an enchanted loom, ‘where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one.’ It’s such a fluid metaphor. The brain as a kind of frame—wherein different patterns arise and fall back, constellate and dissolve. Meaningful patterns but not abiding. Not indelible. Not etched in stone. To extend the metaphor some: it used to be thought, and it was taught, that once the frame got built—sometime, say, in early childhood—that was the frame you went through the rest of your life with. And if it got dented along the way, which it inevitably would, then that dented structure is what you were stuck with. The implication also being that a dented structure would be likely to weave a rather misshapen fabric—and even perhaps the same fabric, over and over. Not a particularly encouraging model. Neuroplasticity offers something different. A different model.The loom can change.The actual frame can change.The loom is, well—enchanted. Begley builds a story for neuroplasticity by tracing its early history in Chapter 2 of her book. First, she cites the psychologist William James, who wrote as early as 1890 that ‘organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity.’ Then she outlines a series of studies, performed by a series of scientists, including the aforementioned Charles Sherrington, who early in the last century began to question whether our brain maps were fixed maps. (Brain maps, first laid out in the late 1800’s, are what they sound like they would be—maps of the brain cortex which lay out which parts of the brain are handling what—including both incoming signals—the sensory signals—and outgoing—or motor—signals. Thus, for instance, a specific portion of your brain receives sensory signals from your fingers when they touch a keyboard. Another portion of your brain is associated with moving those fingers. Yet another section of the brain allows you to process what you see...

Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 13, 2008 in Uncategorized

A memoir of a woman waking up through the practices of writing and Buddhism 1993 Natalie Goldberg has published ten books. Seven of these I’ve read, including her first book, Writing Down the Bones, and her most recent, Old Friend from Far Away, a book reminiscent of Bones but skewed more toward the writing of memoir. This book, her third, remains my favorite. I began rereading it on one recent Sunday and ended up finishing nearly the whole book that same day. It was a September Sunday. I also cleaned the porch, swam laps, bought a flat of giant pansies, fixed supper, carried on conversations, listened to music. But between all that, and among all that, I read Long Quiet Highway. My mind seeming to get quieter and quieter as I read it. Clearer. More awake? The subtitle of Ms. Goldberg’s book is Waking Up in America. If there were a central question to the book it might be this one: What exactly does it mean to be awake? What might it mean to wake up in America or anywhere else? What might writing have to do with it? What might Buddhism have to do with it? First, the long sleep, as counterpoint. She describes walking through the halls of her high school in Long Island: . . . hair pulled back in a pony tail, walking lonesome down those halls, up and down many flights of stairs, going into Latin and Algebra classes, passing rest rooms and janitor storage rooms, lost for a whole century of my life. She describes a “doomed lethargy.” A feeling of “disconnection from the present.” Then, moments of awakening:A moment in English class when the teacher turned out the lights and told them to listen to the rain. to connect a sense organ with something natural, neutral, good. He asked me to become alive. I was scared, and I loved it. A moment after graduating from college, alone in a rented room, writing a poem about a chocolate cake. It held my entire childhood. I smelled the baking, the garbage in the streets, heard the cash register ring, felt the newsboy on the corner, saw the green container they used to box the cake. This was all coming up from someplace inside me. I wrote my first real poem. I had never felt this way before. Sensory awakenings. A sense of re-connecting— A moment in front of a sixth-grade class as a teacher in Albequerque, New Mexico when her chest begins to ache and an image comes to her that her heart is opening like a giant peony. One thing leads to another after that. She leaves her teaching job and goes to live at the Lama Foundation, a kind of spiritual camp. She moves to Boulder and studies with Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. Eventually she travels to Minneapolis. She meets, Katagiri Roshi, a Zen Buddhist monk, and asks him to be her teacher. For me, this is the moment at which this book becomes absolutely compelling. The moment that pulled me in and kept me reading all of one Sunday. This in spite of the fact that the moment itself is in many ways quite ordinary. It occurs in the kitchen of the Zen Center in Minneapolis. Roshi is wearing...

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 6, 2008 in Uncategorized

An informative and well-written overview of the research on brain plasticity with a foreword by the Dalai Lama 2007 Part One: An Introduction This book is better than it’s title. Not so much a one-size-fits-all set of instructions for training your mind—in fact not that at all—but rather a systematic review, in clear plain language, of the relevant neuroscience. By the time you come to the end of this book, you might well begin to suspect that we’re training our minds all the time—at the same time changing our brains—whether we’re aware of it or not. And you might even find yourself wanting to design your own personalized set of instructions. That said, this is also somewhat of a dense book—there’s a lot of information here. And I’m thinking that rather than try to brush by all of it on one page I’m going to offer an introduction here—enough to give a sense of the book—and then over the next couple months I’m going to take a few of the chapters and look at them more closely. So, an overview—courtesy of the 5 Ws. WHAT AND WHEN? A meeting of the Mind and Life Institute in 2004 on neuroplasticity. This meeting offering the occasion—and the structure—for Sharon Begley’s book. The history of the meeting is interesting. Back in 1983, an entrepreneur in California, Adam Engle, who was also a practicing Buddhist, heard that the Dalai Lama was interested in science. Engle got the notion of making something happen, perhaps a meeting of some sort. Aware of Fritjof Capra’s book, The Tao of Physics, his first thought was that physics would become the science of interest. He met with Capra, and found him “lukewarm” to the idea. Not long afterward he got a call from a neuroscientist, also a practicing Buddhist, by the name of Francisco Varela who had met the Dalai Lama at a conference on consciousness. He is reported to have told Engle on the phone: “you don’t want this to be on physics; cognitive science makes much more sense.” Thus the Mind & Life Institute was born. A bevy of cognitive scientists meeting periodically with the Dalai Lama and Buddhist scholars. This particular meeting on neuroplasticity is number XII in the series. WHERE? The conference was held at Upper Dharamsala, in Northern India, the Dalai Lama’s home in exile. The meeting took place in the Dalai Lama’s compound, and I appreciate that Sharon Begley gives a sense of the place: “forested with pines and rhododendrons; ceramic pots spilling purple bougainvillea and saffron marigolds surrounding the widely spaced buildings.” WHO? Five neuroscientists and The Dalai Lama along with assorted others—including scientists, Buddhist scholars and students, philanthropists, and journalists—-(all these folks are at the meeting but few speak—mostly the book is about the work of the 5 neuroscientists as it pertains to plasticity; occasionally the Dalai Lama speaks) WHY? The central question of the conference: Does the brain have the ability to change, and what is the power of the mind to change it? WHAT DO I WISH THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE DONE? (An extra W) I wish the book would have offered more of a sense of dialogue among the scientists and the Dalai Lama along with the Buddhist scholars and students who were also present. Much of...